The Unending Hunger: Tracing Women and Food Insecurity Across Borders

By Megan A. Carney

Based on ethnographic fieldwork from Santa Barbara, California, this book sheds light on the ways that food insecurity prevails in women’s experiences of migration from Mexico and Central America to the United States. As women grapple with the pervasive conditions of poverty that hinder efforts at getting enough to eat, they find few options for alleviating the various forms of suffering that accompany food insecurity. Examining how constraints on eating and feeding translate to the uneven distribution of life chances across borders and how "food security" comes to dominate national policy in the United States, this book argues for understanding women’s relations to these processes as inherently biopolitical.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Jan 23, 2015
• ISBN: 9780520959675

Megan A. Carney

Megan A. Carney is Assistant Professor in the School of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Regional Food Studies at the University of Arizona. Her writing has appeared in The Hill, The Conversation, and Civil Eats.

Book preview

The Unending Hunger

The Unending Hunger

Tracing Women and Food Insecurity across Borders

Megan A. Carney

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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

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University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2015 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Carney, Megan A., 1984–

    The unending hunger : tracing women and food insecurity across borders / Megan A. Carney.

        pages    cm

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 978-0-520-28400-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)— ISBN 978-0-520-95967-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)— ISBN 9780520959675 (ebook)

    1. Women immigrants—United States.    2. Mexicans—United States.    3. Central Americans—United States.    4. Food security—United States.    5. Food security—Government policy—United States.    I. Title.

    JV6602.C37 2015

    362.83’9812083–dc23

2014035669

Manufactured in the United States of America

24  23  22  21  20  19  18  17  16  15

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Natures Natural, a fiber that contains 30% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

For my ancestors, especially for my grandparents—Joan Vedder, Murman Vedder, Isabel Carney, and Edward F. Carney—as well as for the generations yet to come. May you be born into a better world.

CONTENTS

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. We Had Nothing to Eat: The Biopolitics of Food Insecurity

2. Caring through Food: La Lucha Diaria

3. Nourishing Neoliberalism? Narratives of Sufrimiento

4. Disciplining Caring Subjects: Food Security as a Biopolitical Project

5. Managing Care: Strategies of Resistance and Healing

Conclusion

Epilogue

Appendix One

Appendix Two

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

1. A residential street in the community of fieldwork

2. A storefront in Goleta

3. A storefront in Goleta

4. A Mexican tienda in Carpinteria

5. A Virgen de Guadalupe altar at a trailer park in Carpinteria

6. A Virgen de Guadalupe altar at a trailer park in Carpinteria

7. Nursery grounds in Carpinteria

8. Malena’s self-portrait

9. Gloria trimming nopales

10. Dora with her children

11. Gloria in her kitchen

12. Betanía warming tortillas

13. Brenda’s self-portrait

14. Paloma preparing fish filets and rice for lunch

15. A poster issued by MyPyramid (USDA) adorning the wall of a community center

16. An FSBC booth at a local food festival

17. Educational flier from Rethink Your Drink

18. Ingredients for a healthy snack and the MyPyramid poster at a Kid’s Farmer’s Market program site

19. Santa Cruz Market, one of the popular tiendas

20. Sunday shoppers at the Goleta Swap Meet

21. Dora and her daughter at a food distribution site

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First and foremost, my deepest gratitude goes to the women at the heart of this book who graciously invited me into their lives and injected this work with the stories that follow. This work is as much a product of their labor as it is of my own.

The seeds for this project were planted long ago, both literally and metaphorically, while I was an undergraduate at the University of California–Los Angeles. It was during these years that I became involved with a student-led, grassroots alternative food movement. This movement formed part of a larger push for sustainability policies within institutions of higher education. I worked with dozens of fellow student organizers through the California Student Sustainability Coalition to advocate for a sustainable food policy in the University of California system, and to cultivate the first small organic farm on UCLA’s campus. I am incredibly thankful to all of those with whom I shared this experience, especially Tim Galarneau, Melissa Haft, and Dorothy Le, and for the friendships that have endured since then. The anthropology department at UCLA was extremely supportive in helping me to link my student activism with my academic pursuits. The anthropology honors program—including Doug Hollan, the chair at the time, and my thesis advisers Alessandro Duranti and Monica Smith—offered the perfect balance of structure and freedom, particularly in exploring and experimenting with one’s intellectual curiosity. I thank the Wasserman family for providing me with my first research grant to conduct anthropological fieldwork, and my peers in the honors program for their continual insights and feedback. I’d also like to thank my college roommate Yanira Lemus for inspiring me to study immigrant foodways in sharing with me her family’s recipes from El Salvador. I am humbled by our friendship and the hospitality that her family has shown me over the years as I also marvel at the story of how her parents were able to escape from civil war in El Salvador and to create a new life for their family in the United States.

There are those who provided critical guidance and feedback as I further refined my research interests during graduate school at the University of California–Santa Barbara. My dissertation committee could not have been more supportive and encouraging throughout the various phases of this project. In her five years of ser vice as my dissertation chair, Susan Stonich bestowed me with an immense appreciation and respect for all aspects of research. I am especially thankful to her for valuing my ambitions toward an engaged anthropology and for supporting my decision to foreground social outcomes in my work. I am also indebted to the other members of this committee, including Melissa Caldwell, Teresa Figueroa, Leila Rupp, and Casey Walsh. Melissa Caldwell has continued to be an unrelenting champion for this project; she has always provided timely and thoughtful feedback, and has been a beacon of inspiration for encouraging me to move the project forward into the development of a book. I am also thankful to her for steering me toward theory that would have otherwise been off my radar. Casey Walsh helped me to scale this project from the level of theory down to the ground and back up again. As the department adviser to graduate students at UCSB, he was also a steady source of moral support. I always walked away from meetings at his office feeling more grounded in my project and optimistic about the future. Leila Rupp illuminated the interdisciplinary significance of my research, and provided necessary feminist critique as I began writing. Last but not least, Teresa Figueroa enhanced this project with her rich knowledge of immigrant communities in Santa Barbara County. I also credit her, along with Travis Du Bry, with diversifying my familiarity with the vast literatures of political economy, transborder migration, and Chicano studies. Aside from these individuals I am also indebted to Patricia Allen, Molly Anderson, Allison Carruth, Susan Greenhalgh, Julie Guthman, Lisa Jacobson, Erika Rappaport, and Lois Stanford for the mentoring they provided me while I was completing my graduate studies. In addition, my graduate student peers enriched my experience in the classroom as well as in the field. In particular, my gratitude goes to Heather Berg, Martin Brix, Alison Hendley, Eric Humel, Maritza Maksimow, Rani Mclean, Heather Thakar, Lindsay Vogt, and Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern.

During graduate school, I also had the fortune of participating in several interdisciplinary research groups. The University of California Multicampus Research Program on Food and the Body provided ample opportunity for circulating works in progress and connecting with esteemed scholars in related fields. The Interdisciplinary Humanities Center (IHC) at UCSB served as my home away from home on campus. I am especially grateful to Ann Bermingham and Emily Zinn from the IHC for connecting me to sources of funding and opportunities for presenting my work to diverse audiences.

There are several members of the community in Santa Barbara to whom I am grateful for welcoming me into their lives and offering various forms of support during the course of my field-work. Raquel Lopez was a steadfast liaison, as well as a patient and gifted focus group facilitator. Amy Lopez from the Foodbank of Santa Barbara County (FSBC) was generous with her time and in allowing me to learn more about her work while she also connected me with many important individuals for the purposes of this research; she never ceases to impress me with her boundless energy and passion for improving people’s lives, and I feel honored to call her my friend. Other members of the FSBC staff were equally accommodating and supportive. In addition, I am thankful to those individuals who were involved with the development of the Santa Barbara County Food Policy Council in its infant stages, the Santa Barbara County Public Health Department, and my many fellow organizers over the years who continue to prove themselves as talented and dynamic movers and shakers, including Bridget Dobrowski, Jasper Eiler, Gina Fischer, Gerri French, Heather Hartley, Alison Hensley, and Eric Lohela.

I received additional mentoring while in postdoctoral appointments at the University of Washington and at Arizona State University. It was during this time that I was able to further develop and refine the arguments from my dissertation for the production of this book. The UW Department of Anthropology and the Latin American and Caribbean studies program provided many opportunities for exchange with a talented array of scholars. I am especially grateful to professors Ann Anagnost, Rachel Chapman, and Janelle Taylor from the Department of Anthropology, as well as professor José Antonio Lucero for welcoming me into his Sawyer Seminar, B/ordering Violence. Ann Anagnost provided a very warm welcome by helping to or ga nize a series of workshops in the spring around the theme of food in which I was able to circulate an early draft of one of the chapters of this book. I also thank professor Bettina Shell-Duncan for supporting this series through the UW Medical Anthropology and Global Health program.

The Comparative Border Studies Institute and the School of Transborder Studies at ASU generously provided the time and space in which to put the finishing touches on my manuscript and submit it for publication. In particular, I thank professors Edward Escobar, Desiree Garcia, Matt Garcia, and Cecilia Menjívar for coordinating the postdoctoral fellowship in comparative border studies, and several members of the ASU faculty and staff for supporting me throughout the course of the yearlong fellowship, including Elizabeth Cantu, Maria Luz Cruz-Torres, Yasmina Katsulis, Airín Martinez, Luis Plascencia, and Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez. In addition, the Institute for Humanities Research Immigration Research Cluster, as well as the School of Human Evolution and Social Change, connected me with opportunities to present my work and to receive feedback. Last but not least, I was constantly inspired and supported by my CBS postdoctoral colleagues Holly Karibo and Laia Soto-Bermant.

A small handful of individuals exceeded all expectations of generosity in reading earlier versions of the manuscript and providing essential feedback that undoubtedly enabled its thorough enhancement. Ann Anagnost and Emily Yates-Doerr both graciously agreed to be the first reviewers of the work in its (almost complete) entirety. Reviewers Leo Chavez and Teresa Mares assessed the work with their vast expertise in the topic and offered extremely helpful suggestions for developing the final version.

This project would not have been possible without the generous support of several funding sources. I received a dissertation grant to cover the fieldwork expenses from the University of California Institute for Mexico and the United States. This grant allowed me to train and hire a small number of undergraduate research assistants from UCSB. Some of these students were more involved than others, but Mary Alvarado, Jessie Fidler, Fatima Segura, and Emily Terrill had a significant role at various stages of the project. I received additional funding for preliminary phases of research and for writing from the UCLA Center for Labor and Employment, the Chicano Studies Institute at UCSB, the UCSB Graduate Division, the UCSB Department of Anthropology, and the UCSB IHC Predoctoral Fellows Program.

The staff at University of California Press has been incredibly supportive at all stages of bringing this book to publication. I am thankful especially to Kate Marshall for championing this work and believing in its potential impact. Stacy Eisenstark has also been very helpful in offering her valuable technical assistance. I very much appreciate their patience in working with a first-time book author; it has been a true plea sure to work with both of them.

Because so many people have undoubtedly touched my life and have shaped my thinking in a number of ways, I apologize to those whose names I may have left out here by accident.

It is sometimes assumed that authors (as well as scholars, for that matter) lead isolated and lonely lives. I feel incredibly blessed to say that this is not at all true in my case. In the years culminating in the work that follows, there has been a large circle of family and friends I have been able to call on for various forms of support. For their unconditional love and encouragement I especially thank my parents Edward Carney and Danna Vedder; my stepmother Linda Carney; my siblings Matthew Carney, Alexandra Dunn, and Aerin Ginsberg; my grandparents, to whom this book is dedicated; my in-laws Karl Johnson, Barbara Johnson, and Steve Johnson; Carol Lorraine and Ted Massart; and some of my dearest friends Jessica Alder, Gina Mesiti-Miller, Jessica Robles, and Lynzy Smeenk. Jessica Lanuza has also been a faithful tutor and incredible friend over the years. Muchísimas gracias por todo lo que me has enseñado.

Finally, I am most indebted to Lucas Johnson, my loving husband and enduring companion in life, who believes in me more than anyone else and never allows me to give up.

Introduction

Struggling to feed her children and fearing the possibility of hunger, Malena perceived no other option but to migrate in search of work from her home state of Guerrero, Mexico, to the United States. She lived with relatives in Santa Barbara, California, while she tried to find employment. Both the language barrier and the risks associated with her unauthorized status instilled fear in Malena and posed further challenges to surviving her surroundings. Despite finally securing a job as a hotel housekeeper in which she regularly clocked more than seventy hours per week, there was still never enough time or money to alleviate the painful, everyday constraints on feeding and eating that had followed her from Mexico. In the language of public health practitioners and emergency food programs, chronic food insecurity continued to haunt Malena in the United States. As one aspect of the material scarcity experienced by Malena, chronic food insecurity not only reflected how limited resources could be harming the health of Malena and her family but also signaled a weakening of the social relations once regularly enacted and sustained through food. Sadly, Malena blamed herself for failing to overcome this material scarcity. Contrary to her original expectations, life in the United States did not offer much reprieve from the suffering she had experienced in Mexico. Estranged from her children and without much hope for the future, she had been rendered to feel powerless, anxious, socially isolated, and excluded.

Malena was not at all alone in her experience.

Indeed, stories such as Malena’s are all too common. They speak to how disruptions to eating and feeding register at both the personal and social levels and articulate the experiences of women migrating across borders. Yet, curiously, these women’s stories have hitherto been overlooked in the rich literature on migration from Mexico and Central America to the United States. This book brings these women’s stories to the fore.

WHAT’S GROWING IN YOUR OWN BACKYARD: SANTA BARBARA COUNTY AS A MICROCOSM OF THE GLOBAL

This book features the experiences of migrant women who are living in Southern California, and specifically in the coastal region of Santa Barbara County, a place that has come to epitomize the concept of hunger in the land of plenty. Boasted of in travel brochures and real estate magazines as the American Riviera, Santa Barbara County is popularly depicted as a place brimming with material affluence and natural beauty that is enjoyed by all who go there. Yet this depiction could not be any farther from reality.

As is increasingly the case in the United States, extreme disparities of wealth prevail in the county, where an increasing number of poverty-stricken house holds exist alongside some of the nation’s wealthiest house holds. As of the 2010 census, almost one in five residents (18 percent) of Santa Barbara County were living below the federal poverty level (US Census Bureau 2010). Although the economic recession most likely had an effect on figures in the 2010 census, poverty had risen significantly since prior assessments (up from 11.9 percent of house holds in 2007). Rather than representing an exception, the upward trending of poverty in Santa Barbara County is consistent with that of much of the United States, a situation that has sparked much vitriol and debate in recent years around class warfare, the 99 percent, and the haves and have-nots. It is perhaps not so surprising or coincidental that the research on which this book is based coincided with the emergence of the Occupy movement in the United States that has since swept across many parts of the globe.

Of course, there are many historical and geographical characteristics that distinguish Santa Barbara County from other popular tourist destinations and desired places to live in the United States (and the world); I will expand on those unique characteristics in the coming pages. Yet fundamentally, it is not so different from any of these other places. I imagine that many readers will have their own version(s) of Santa Barbara in drawing from the list of places they have lived and traveled. It may even include their own backyards.

FOOD SECURITY AS A BIOPOLITICAL PROJECT

Scholars of globalization have identified a central contradiction of neoliberal capitalism—namely, that capital and commodities move uninhibitedly across geopolitical borders while the movement of labor is restrained. To this relatively recent discussion in the social sciences I lend the following revision: food, in its commodity form and as a site of capital accumulation, moves uninhibitedly across geopolitical borders while growing numbers of people face fewer and fewer options for guaranteeing their means of survival. Food consistently ranks at the top of this list. In an arrangement that some are now calling the neoliberal food regime (Pechlaner and Otero 2010), the corporate takeover of the global food system is predicated on a system of values that places profits before people (Nally 2011). The global reach of this arrangement continues to displace millions from rural agrarian livelihoods who must then migrate as a means to find economic alternatives and to alleviate food insecurity.

I approach food insecurity as an object of ethnographic inquiry for the reasons that its meaning is anything but simple and its location is all too imprecise. As I explain herein, this concept has come to index an array of technical definitions as well as a host of politics wherein these definitions are constructed. In addition, the term food insecurity has also garnered wider usage in recent years as part of the popular vernacular in the United States, being adopted by media and the realm of emergency food assistance. Rather than passively engaging with this concept, I suggest we need to unpack its multiple meanings and usages, particularly when it becomes a label to infer the competencies of individual human beings.

The sister concepts of food insecurity and food security were formally launched at the first World Food Conference in 1974 (Pottier 1999), and have since undergone several iterations. The latest definition put forth by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) describes food security as a situation that exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life (FAO 2002). The FAO identifies four dimensions of food security: food availability, economic and physical access to food, food utilization, and stability over time. Food insecurity, by contrast, is outlined as [a] situation that exists when people lack secure access to sufficient amounts of safe and nutritious food for normal growth and development and an active and healthy life (FAO 2002).

Although in many cases expert opinion continues to dominate policy discussions about global food security (Page-Reeves 2014; Pottier 1999), the goal with subsequent definitions and annual measurements issued by the FAO has been to better approximate the lived experiences of vulnerable populations. The 2013 State of Food Insecurity in the World report, for instance, claims to go beyond measuring chronic food deprivation. It presents a broader suite of indicators that aims to capture the multidimensional nature of food insecurity, its determinants, and outcomes (FAO 2013, 4).

As with many large-scale development projects, global interventions to food insecurity have usually been administered in a top-down method through which the agents of development appear to act paternalistically toward a group or population of so-called beneficiaries. The Green Revolution of the